The government may favour multiple standards for e-governance projects. To remove unnecessary lock-in of technology, information technology department of Government of India might move away from its earlier stand of supporting a single standard for such projects. But no final decision has yet been reached on the issue.
Single standard is supported by the open document format (ODF) brigade like IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems in India, while multiple standards are supported by technology major Microsoft and TCS, Infosys, and trade body Nasscom etc.
Till very recently, i.e. 26th November 2008, the draft policy on open standards, was open to public review. It attracted many comments on why to choose multiple standards over single one as that would create an unnecessary lock-in of the technology and force citizens to use a single format for all government-related efforts like land records, public records and database etc.
But there are issues with using multiple standards as well, as that would create interoperability bottlenecks among the different standards, which is still not completely smooth with accuracy at 99%.
